[2] Despite the many points that have been brought up by proponents of the continuity thesis, however, a majority of scholars still support the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution occurring in the 16th and 17th centuries.
[1][3][4][5] The idea of a continuity, rather than contrast between medieval and modern thought, begins with Pierre Duhem, the French physicist and philosopher of science.
It is set out in his ten-volume work on the history of science, Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic.
Unlike many former historians such as Voltaire and Condorcet, who did not consider the Middle Ages to be of much intellectual importance [citation needed], Duhem tried to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster the development of Western science.
Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools.
Nicole Oresme, who wrote on theology and money, devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics and invented graphs, was the first to perform calculations involving probability, and the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock.
Johan Huizinga's examination of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages,[13] suggests a tendency towards elaborate theory of signs, which Franklin compares with the degeneracy of modern Marxism.
He cites the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who considered his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in its anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical aspects.
"[14]) The invention of printing he compares to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".
[9] The philosopher and historian Robert Pasnau makes a similar claim that "modernity came in the late twelfth century, with Averroes' magisterial revival of Aristotle and its almost immediate embrace by the Latin West.
Bala proposes that the changes involved in the Scientific Revolution — the mathematical realist turn, the mechanical philosophy, the atomism, the central role assigned to the Sun in Copernican heliocentrism — have to be seen as rooted in multicultural influences on Europe.
He sees specific influences in Alhazen's physical optical theory, Chinese mechanical technologies leading to the perception of the world as a machine, the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which carried implicitly a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking, and the heliocentrism rooted in ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism.
[19] Critics note that lacking documentary evidence of transmission of specific scientific ideas, Bala's model will remain "a working hypothesis, not a conclusion".